film theory that in her view best captures the integrative,illusionisttendencies
in Heartfield’swork.²¹The scholarship on Heartfield, she rightlynotes,has priv-
ileged elements of shock and conflictinorder to maintain photomontage’sstatus
as an artistic technique well suited for the democratic narrativesofmodernism
prevalent duringthe ColdWar. Examining the more elusive but equallyimpor-
tant processes of suturing,of“being stitched into”fictional worlds and, by ex-
tension, ideological configurations, bringsinto closerview thoseconstellations
when critical detachment is not needed and adherencetopolitical doctrine re-
quired. In otherwords, how does Heartfieldsproducti’ ve rage complicatethe
conceptual alternativesofrupture and suturepositedbyKriebel in her revision-
ist readingofphotomontage?
At first glance,aKPD poster likeFive Fingerscan easilyberead as an exam-
ple of suture, with the hand on the posterbecomingthe hand in thevoting
booth.Hereinterpellation occurs quite literallythrough what LouisAlthusser,
in his definition of the term, compares to the act of hailing.Inidentifying
with, and as,aworker,the subject thus hailed actsout the desired identity of
proletarian and communist.Bythe sametoken, theAIZcovers where Heartfield
cuts and pastesto unmask the representativesofthe ruling class maybeseen as
typicalexamples of rupture, with the contradictions in society made visible
through the clash between decontextualized and recontextualized images or be-
tween images and texts.However,the rhetorical use of contrast and contradic-
tion in transforminganger into laughter does not necessarilyjustify theautomat-
ic equation of rupturewith critique. After all, in the photomontages that focus on
the classenemy, the proletarian subject remains beyond the framework, with
Heartfield deconstructing the world of appearance but alsoconstructingnew
classed subjects in line with KPD doctrine.Forthe samereason, photomontages
that concealthe fact that they are made up ofreality fragments are no more ma-
nipulative or less self-reflexive than ones thatrelyonmultiperspectivism in their
compositional approach.Formalist readings that argueotherwise cannot in the
final analysis account for the constitutive tension between defensive dogmatism
and aggressive irreverenceinHeartfield’sWeimar-erawork. Thedynamics of rup-
ture and suture, includingtheirrespectiveformal techniques and propagandistic
effects, can onlybeevaluated within the largerideological contextsthat made
the identity of class and partyaprerequisite and intended outcome of these in-
Sabine Kriebel,RevolutionaryBeauty:The Radical Photomontages ofJohn Heartfield(Berke-
ley:University of CaliforniaPress,2014); earlyversions of twochapters werepublished as“Man-
ufacturingDiscontent:John Heartfield’sMass Medium,”New German Critique36.2 (2009):
53 – 88 and“Photomontage in theYear 1932:JohnHeartfield and the National Socialists,”Oxford
ArtJournal31.1(2008): 97 – 127.
John Heartfield’sProductiveRage 313